 It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psychophysical self-education will become two aspects of one in the same process. All the arts, literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction, self-education and communist man will be enclosed will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become a measure of the stronger, wiser and subtler. His body will become more harmonized, his movement more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic and the average human will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Gaultier or a Marx. And above this ridge, new peaks will rise. Trotsky wrote that in the 20s and I wanted to open with that quote because I want to end this event on a note of profound optimism. In part because I'm sure I'm going to upset some people. Everyone has a opinion about art. You can't help having a opinion about art. And I'm going to talk about what in my view should be the Marxist approach to the question of art and culture. But what I want us to bear in mind is that we're thinking about the levels to which human culture can be raised. We're thinking about unleashing the potential of humanity. Now, how do Marx understand art and culture? The history of humanity and class struggle is driven by the pursuit of the necessities of life. And art isn't a necessity in the same way that food, water and shelter are all necessities. We don't need to look at paintings to not die or starve to death or freeze to death, strictly speaking. And we certainly can't make art really until some of the basics of life are provided for. But humans have been creating art for basically as long as we've existed as a species. So I would say that art is a necessity in the sense that we are driven inexorably to create it. And really no life worth living could do without it. Marx writes that the life of the working class begins when working day ends. What does a worker actually care about? The miserable eight hours he spends being exploited? Or the film he watches after work? Or the book he reads? Or the film that he goes to the cinema to watch? Or the play that he goes to watch? This is real life. And culture, separate from art, is all that's been created, assimilated and achieved by man throughout the course of history. All the tools, buildings, machines, all the objective means and results of production. But culture also consists of ideas, skills, science, customs, and art. And we assimilate and build upon the culture of past generations, developing and redeveloping it and passing it on to the next generation. And only humans can really do this or at least to this level of complexity. No other animals can. And while we now have advanced AI tools that try to imitate human creativity, they're pretty limited to say the least. They can't really produce original ideas. My wife loves playing around with one of these programs called Stable Diffusion. And it obviously reflects the bias of the images fed to it. So it's really good at drawing pretty anime girls, but it can't really do much else reliably. And it's much more effective if you add each prompt within the style of Dali, Picasso, what have you. And I really think this goes to demonstrate in a microcosmic sense that in art, as in everything else, human labor, physical or mental, is the only thing that can create new values. And that's true of art as well. So what is art then? Trotsky describes science as a way of understanding the world as a system of laws and art as a grouping of feelings. And I know what I mean. If you've ever admired a beautiful painting or been moved by a piece of music, the work of art is stirring emotions in you. It's a basic function of art, which has taken many forms and served many ends over the course of history. And I do believe that such a thing is progress and development in art. So I think there are two sides to it. On the one hand, there's the more or less objective question of technique, which is related to science, technology, refinement of methods. Just off of one example, Pythagoras used a single string of instruments, or the wire between two pins, to study musical intervals, differences in pitch, in relation to the ratios of vibrating strings at different lengths. And much later, you have a development upon this idea with the polyphonic keyboards, which was affected in the Renaissance. It's the same mathematical principle, but different string lengths produce different intervals when entwined, returning at a higher level with better instruments like the piano to achieve greater compositional complexity than the monocles. But there's another subjective side to artistic development, and that's the increasing maturity of ideas. If you were to give a neolithic man Mozart's piano, he wouldn't have written the marriage of Figaro. Given 100 years, he wouldn't have written the marriage of Figaro. The idea would not occur to him. The kind of culture and society capable of producing a piece of art like this just exists on a totally different level. And the subjective side of artistic development is really just as important as the development of technique, and both, of course, are dialectically interrelated. I'll demonstrate later in the lead-off. I would say, as part of culture, in general, art advances based on the progressive development of the productive forces. While in general, it enters crisis and stagnation when the mode of production reaches an impasse. But it'd be very mechanical for us to stop there. The question is far from straightforward, as Marx explains, I quote, as regards art, it is well known that some of its peaks by no means correspond to the general development of society, nor do they therefore to the material substructure. And sometimes, decline and collapse in society can actually inspire important developments in art. To see this in action, take, for example, the Hell panel from Piranhas Bosch's remarkable triptych painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted between 1419 and 1510 during a period of decline and crisis of feudalism. And this nightmarish image of damnation shows a world ripped apart by madness with people consumed by abstract figures that defy all sense of logic. And this was an unconscious expression of a mood in society, as a mode of production was coming to an end, becoming irrational. And this irrationality found its way unconsciously through the Boschist paintbrush. The development of surrealism, as well, in the period of organic capitalist crisis in the 1930s, also produced very fine work, which similarly expressed the nightmare of capitalism in a state of senile decay with literally nightmarish, dream-like imagery. Trotsky actually wrote a very good manifesto of revolutionary art with the surrealist artist Andre Bresson. So there can be peaks during periods of decline. But today, I think we are living through the general crisis of bourgeois culture. I just come out of a talk, a very good talk, about how bourgeois science and philosophy have become effective with all sorts of mystical, pessimistic, and inward-looking ideas. And in art, I think there's been a daft of new ideas as the capitalists squeezed, tried, and tested formulas to break the prophets. Now, were the art continues to be made? I'm not going to be use phobias in here. I'm saying that there's no such thing as good art under capitalist crisis. Good art will always be made in the same way that there will always be advances in science while the general nature of bourgeois philosophy decays. But I would say the cause bourgeois culture is rife with cynicism and charlatanry that reflects itself in art. And artists and workers in creative industries are also increasingly exploited and at the mercy of the market. And I would say there is nothing more annihilating the creative human spirit than living under a system rotten right through the throat. So the development of art is a measure of the development of civilisation, not a direct one, an indirect one. Starting with the division of labour. So before the Neolithic Revolution, which was the point where you have capitalist communities and agriculture and the emergence of classes of society, before then there was no class of society, no division of labour, and also no differentiation between arts, work, religion, science. It's all kind of mixed up. And cave art from this period actually depicts very few human figures, very few people. It mostly consists of highly detailed illustrations of animals. And the anthropologist Gordon Child speculated that these paintings were full of art magic believed to give hunters mystical control over their quarry. So this art was purposeful. It was entirely purposeful. It's only with the rise of slave society, which freed an elite class to think and plan culture on a higher level, that art begins to take on more of a life of its own. Now the oldest existing piece of what we might call literature, I would say, is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is a series of poems written in the Akkadian language of the first ancient empire, Mesopotamia, about 4,000 years ago. And it's not a strictly religious or historical text. It's a tragedy about a mythical, semi-mythical, Sumerian hero, a divine king of Buruk. And after losing his best friend to an illness, he goes on a series of quests where he tries and fails many times to become an awful. Only the elite of Mesopotamian society at that time would have read this story. And it contains a clear moral message. No matter how great you are, you will die one day. And that's still quite an important and common messaging art. And this unresolved Sombra story was highly influential on the tragic heroes of ancient Greek mythology, or at least ancient Greeks came to similar conclusions in their art. And these developments represent, I would say coherently, the emergence of human beings throughout the first time. And it was also concocted with a push towards realism in all art forms. If you look at the Greek and Roman sculpture, it literally looks like real people are fighting to emerge from the marble. After the collapse, though, of the Western Roman Empire, in Europe at least, important techniques in architecture, textiles, stone masonry and so on were simply lost, along with literally complex writing systems in huge swathes of the continent. So you go from Virgil to illiteracy in an entire swath of the continent in just a few centuries. It was different elsewhere, particularly in Byzantium, the Middle East and Asia, arts like poetry, architecture, painting and so on, continue to develop. But I'm not an expert in these traditions. Perhaps I can come out with a discussion later. But the so-called migration era, it's a euphemism, really. Dark Ages is a more appropriate term in my view. And the Middle Ages plunged Western Europe into a millennium of barbarism in which the church builds up a spiritual dictatorship over the culture, denying independent thought. And you see this reflected in art. I'll go out in a limb here. I don't think that medieval drawings are just different from Roman frescoes. I think they're worse. And you compare the lively, vibrant and technically accurate Roman frescoes with medieval drawings. All the people have the same face, the same dopey, upcast eyes. There's no internal content, but dull deference towards their god and their king. Their humanity has been stripped away. But even under these conditions, a handful of exceptional artists managed to fight back, vent their frustration and produce really excellent arts. Geoffrey Chaucer, for example, the father of English literature, came from a bourgeois background. He was the son of wine merchants, whose name actually comes from the French word, the stocking maker. He despised corruption in the church. And because his family had the ear of the king, because he used to provide them with his wines, he was indulged a lot more than most in making his feelings known. So as anyone here read the Canterbury Tales, couple, ah, awful, you should all read it. In the Summoner's Prologue, he talks of a friar who goes to hell. And the friar, finding himself alone, assumes that's because friars are all such good Christians that all the rest must be in heaven. But then, I quote, just as the bees come swarming from a hive, out of the devil's arsehole, there he drives, full 20,000 friars in a rout, and through all hell they swarmed and ran about, which fairly succinctly describes Geoffrey Chaucer's feelings about the stifling nature of the religious establishment. And it's no accident that Chaucer was an early representative of the bourgeois class, who would eventually overthrow feudalism and transform culture in their image. The Gothic style, I think, is a sort of missing lake in which the bourgeois were turning their backs on the squalor and ignorance of feudalism back to the wonders of antiquity, which would actually be preserved by the Muslim world for inspiration. And Trotsky explains that the great bourgeois cultural revolution, which we call the Renaissance, only began when the new social class, already culturally satiated, felt itself strong enough to come out from under the yoke of the Gothic arch and to use the technique of the past for its own artistic aims. And the Renaissance is a good demonstration of what I mentioned earlier, this dialectical relationship between the technical, the objective, if you like, and the most objective developments in art. Take, for instance, the invention of the printing press. Mechanized printing reflected the development of capitalism, which is increasingly striving for mechanical production, pushing aside arduous, inefficient, handmade methods. And the bourgeoisie at this time were also feverishly seeking out ideas to devour, which fed the demand for a faster method of reproducing literature than time-consuming hand-copier. Books during the Middle Ages were very expensive. They were handwritten, and the Church and the aristocracy had an effective monopoly on written material, which meant that the majority of what was written down was their religious texts, historical documents, bookkeeping, all inscribed painstakingly by-hand, mostly in monasteries. But with the printing press, the rising middle class was better equipped to read, to write, disseminate secular literature. Poetry plays reflections on human matters like love, death, suffering, injustice, and it's here that the individual begins to emerge in art. Not the individual has an emblem of an archetype, an embodiment of this or that by-soul virtue, not a religious figure, but has rounded real people with dreams, hopes, aspirations with complexity. If you compare, say, the epics of Homer with the tragedies of William Shakespeare, I think you can see some of the logic of progress that I've been talking about in the Iliad and the Odyssey, which I love, by the way, tragically flawed men are driven to ruin by the whims of the gods, but in my favorite Shakespearean tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, two young lovers are driven to mutual suicide because a senseless vendetta between noble families and it's a complex and many-sided story. It's about love, it's about family, about revenge, it's about faith, but the gods don't come into it really. They're referenced here and there, but the whole story we work without them. This is a purely human story. Now, after the Reformation, with their version of the capitalist system and their personal relationship to God through Protestantism, they were striving to be more than mere subjects. They wanted to go their own way to enrich themselves both figuratively and literally. And this prepared a major breakthrough in art, a leap forward that lasted hundreds of years. Most artists, up until around the 14th to 16th century, are actually unknown to us individuals. They were basically just serving to come by wealthy people to produce stuff for them of church. But around this time, during the Renaissance, individual great artists begins to appear to us and their subject matter starts to change. It becomes much more in touch with everyday life. So in the aftermath of the Dutch Revolution, a bloody affair in which the Netherlands broke away from Spain comes my favourite painter and I think, in my humble opinion, the greatest portraitist in history, Rembrandt. And he painted nobles, common folk, brothelgoers and a huge volume of painstakingly honest self-portraits showing the artists from youth to old age and sickness and health, joy and sorrow, capturing the whole gamut of human experience. And I defy the most stony heart among you not to be touched by the paintings of his wife while she was dying from tuberculosis. He felt compelled to capture this genuine experience. This is a bourgeois artist reflecting the world as he really saw it not as the church or the laws told him it should be concerned with life in this world not just in the next one. Now, the French Revolution of 1789 and its aftermath were a major inspiration to bourgeois artists although I have to say mostly outside of France, at least initially. The Romantic poets in Britain were heavily influenced by the French Revolution both politically and as a source of artistic inspiration. The British Romantic poets, William Wordsworth was actually a first-hand witness to the French Revolution and he provides a particularly vivid portrayal of the revolution in his semi-autobiographical prelude. I think this is actually one of the best evictions of a revolution so as to capture the essence of it and how it feels he says, Now, unfortunately, the bourgeois radical can only go so far and most retreated into pessimism with the Bonapartist counter-revolution in France. Wordsworth actually went further than the most he became aware of the French Revolution and the French Revolution as a source of artistic inspiration as a source of artistic inspiration as a source of artistic inspiration as a source of artistic inspiration as a source of artistic inspiration as actually went further than the most he became an apologist for the brutality of the British States for which he was rewarded with a laureate ship by Robert Peele If you read young William Wordsworth with old William Wordsworth they are different people it's one of the biggest schools from great artistic history in my opinion and there are notable exceptions such as the other great Romantic poet, Percy Shelley who remains a radical Republican until his death as well and in Vienna, in my view the greatest composer in history Ludwig van Beethoven supported revolutionary politics even as he continued to revolutionize music right up until the end at one time he actually had illusions in Napoleon Bonaparte as an enlightened liberator in Europe but such was his righteous fury after Napoleon declared himself emperor he scratched his name from his dedication to the Eroica symphony with such force that it tears a hole in the page which remains to this day I think it's one of the most striking and powerful images of revolutionary spirit expressed through art that hole in the Eroica dedication and as it is, the Eroica has dedication to the French Revolution to Nameless Revolutionary which I think makes it a lot more powerful but that's the point about revolution it involves everyone in society it's the heroic will of the broadest masses of society to take control of their destiny and musically the Eroica is the French Revolution it's dissonant, it's dramatic it's about four times longer than any symphony before it it charts the ebbs and the flows the victories and defeats of the Revolution ending in its final movement on this amazing tremendous soaring note of optimism for the future if you haven't heard it, listen to it it is absolutely incredible it's one of the greatest pieces of art ever created in human history in my opinion but while exceptional individuals continue to develop art's new heights as the bourgeois class asserted their control over society and over culture they increasingly viewed art as something to be exploited for profits or shown off conspicuously consumed the terms sometimes used rather than creatively developed and of course the gilded doors of theatres and concert halls remain firmly closed in much of the world to most ordinary people most ordinary people couldn't afford tickets to go to the theatre, go to the opera and so on and of course through imperialism and colonization the bourgeoisie looted and destroyed the cultural achievements of every other civilization they encountered in many parts of the world like the Americas, the Middle East various former African empires European invaders encountered very advanced art I listened to a lead off at the international arts university by Borhe about the conquest of the Americas where he talks about the kind of art that was encountered and it was very advanced and the European invaders stole this art they used it to decorate their galleries and museums much of which remains in galleries and museums to this day I went to the natural history museum a couple of months ago and I went to the place where they displayed all the gemstones at the back there's a bunch of carved gemstones and they said, oh this one's from India it's from Ethiopia how did they end up here? don't talk about that look at the nice stone but this is the point, they stole the cultural heritage of the civilizations they encountered and then through imperialism they held the societies of poverty of unnatural backwardness artificial backwardness which basically stagnated the cultural development of those traditions who knows what they could have gone, were it not for imperialism but of course that's now the asset of history and this I would say is the fundamental limitation of bourgeois culture the bourgeoisie want freedom for themselves they want freedom for them freedom to exploit to dominate, to enrich themselves in the majority and that means that the bulk of mankind's artistic potential is never utilized under capitalism there's a quote from Trotsky about how many swine herds are being on thrones and how many geniuses died herding swine I mean how many Beethoven's, how many Mozart's how many Shakespeare's died in obscurity after working in factories or tilling fields we'll never know their names we'll never be able to experience the genius of human culture and that's the tragedy of capitalism really that's the tragedy of the endpoints or the impasse of the development of bourgeois culture so I would say we live in a contradictory situation today capitalism has developed culture to a tremendous degree tremendous degree and yet in my eyes at least art appears not only stagnant but that stagnation I think consider cinema which I regard as the most advanced product of bourgeois art I'm a bit biased because I was a film student many years ago but I do still think that it combines imagery music, theatre, literature all into one and it's only made possible by industrial production by the mass working class that capitalism brings into being it mechanically reproduces the world in exacting detail but what are we doing with this incredible creation rehashing all ideas for the most part I know it's not a perfect measure but bear with me if you look at the highest grossing films per year of the last ten years at least showing where the bulk of capital in cultural development is invested five of them are superhero movies nine of them are based on existing properties and eight of them are owned by a single company can I guess which one? Disney, there you go House of the Mouse I'm going to be honest here I enjoy some of these films I enjoy some platform there's nothing wrong with enjoying your blockbuster some of them are perfectly well made as pieces of popular art but undeniably I would say this represents a decline in the general scope of creativity and it coincides with the monopolization of the industry and a narrowing of the horizons even with the mainstream I'll give you an example during the so called golden age of Hollywood where the industry was booming in the 1930s and 40s the American film industry was like a factory it pumped out literally hundreds of movies every single year and you have teams of technicians and actors and directors working on these massive blocks and they come in and out and change the backdrops and they just produce this slew of material now not all these films were good but most of them were at least somewhat original and certainly a greater variety of school worries presented but after the wild successes of Jaws in 1975 and Star Wars 1977 both of which are films I like by the way that number dropped dramatically and increasingly absurd amounts of money have been concentrated into a handful of so called tentpole films popping up the whole industry and these are usually fairly lowest common denominator spectacle pictures that are meant to be the safest possible investment they have to be a bit middling they have to be a bit unchallenged because they have to appeal to the widest possible audience in order not to cost the investors who are paying for the films their money and today it's reached such absurd degrees that big movies can be considered a flop for a billion dollars at box office because investors speculate on this kind of performance and astronomical marketing budgets to guarantee that performance often exceed the budget making the film itself we end up in a situation where huge amounts of capital are invested in essentially the same film three or four times a year and sometimes it goes catastrophically wrong and it results in a knock on effect because of the rest of the industry the Tom Hooper adaptation of Cats for example that terrifying Phantasmodoria of Julie Dench as a theory it was such a catastrophe that it had a perceptible knock on effect on Hollywood's risk taking creatively, artistically and financially for the subsequent two years films that should have been made were not made, projects were cancelled jobs were lost because of this terrifying awful film but Hollywood's gross profits have reached huge levels in the last periods global box office revenue this is global to Hollywood grossed from 23 billion dollars in 2005 to 43 billion in 2018 died because of the Covid pandemic but that's a different thing now, lots of interesting films still continue to be made mostly on the margins but even those films are under threat because a shrinking pool of investors are putting more eggs in fewer baskets if you like, investing more and more in fewer more reliable projects and the state bodies that used to subsidize the production of smaller films are easy targets for austerity the British film institutes have seen a 10% real-term budget cut this year and that follows annual real-term budget cuts going back 20 years and as I was writing this lead-off the Edinburgh International Film Festival which is a really important vehicle for independent crossover projects collapsed because of a perfect storm of reduced audiences due to the pandemic rising energy bills and the cost of living crisis which caused the charity behind it to fall so the crisis of capitalism literally and materially destroys the basis by which even the more interesting film projects are created and we see the same problem of narrowing horizons and rising private profits in all fields of art take music for example now the invention of radio recording technologies mass-produced instruments and so on should have been a big impetus to people making and sharing music and to a large extent that was the case and in the post-war period in Britain during the period of capitalist upswing this was supported by massive investments in states-funded art colleges technical schools and university courses from which the likes of John Mennon, Ray Davis Keith Richards, Jeff Beck Brian Ferry, David Bowie all benefited, I think that's a good thing it depends on where you like those artists I suppose I remember a couple of years ago I think it was 2016 and there was this superstitious rumour going throughout the press that it was cursed because all these Ray artists were dying they all came out with the same periods the reason they all seem to be dying at once is because they were all their 60s and 70s took over drugs in 1960s they came out of the period where during upswing the capitalist were investing in culture and the arts to a certain extent and today things have started to turn radically into their opposites platforms like Spotify streaming services like Spotify have a functional monopoly on music distribution to take a big bite of artist revenue even as labels enforce worse and worse deals on artists to capture more royalties and residuals I know this from fact, my brother's a musician and it used to be the case that your cuts to the record label would come most of the out of your sales and you keep money from merch and from touring these days you have to sign what's called a 360 degree deal what does that mean? it means the label gets a bit of everything and it has to because the labels are struggling because of digital distribution where contradictoryly it's easier for everyone to share their music but harder to make a living off of it and you have some of the biggest artists in the world the ones who are successful I think, creatively impacted by the problem this contradiction causes do you have any Canadians in the room? that's good because I was listening to the last couple of big Drake projects and you have these I'm sorry champagne barfies but you are the embodiment of the crisis of culture under arts under capitalism you have these over long artists of weak underwritten tracks of weak underwritten tracks expecting people to stick them on background listening playlists with repetitive hooks to work well on social media this is tailor made to fit the kind of distribution which is most powerful under this period of capitalism and it directly impacts and undermines the arts made now look, there has always been bad music there is always going to be bad music and there is plenty of great music made today but you can literally measure the declining pallets of musical complexity in recent decades the artificial intelligence institute in Barcelona before the study I have a few issues with it but it's still interesting before not about a million songs released between 1955 and 2010 and they were looking at three different musical metrics tomber, pitch and loudness and they found that after peaking in complexity in the 1960s all three have become more homogenous over time and this also kind of reflects the logic of capitalist new musical breakthroughs start in the margins become popular capital pours in and there are thousands of imitators as fast outs and the market becomes exhausting look at punk, look at hip hop for example genres from the fringes inspired by anger by oppression became popular or quickly picked up and commercialised resulting in an increasing glut of bland material the introduction of distribution, digital distribution and music and film is a great example of technological development that should be of massive benefit to us but becomes a fatter through services like Netflix you can easily imagine how any sane society could put the entire sum output of visual media in one place available all over the world at the press of a button but what you have instead are a handful of services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Disney Plus competing for market dominance and forcing you to take out 3, 4, 5 separate subscriptions if you want to watch the Sopranos The Wire and The Godfather this is ridiculous this is literally ridiculous meanwhile workers in these industries endure intensified exploitation streaming services have a different arrangement than traditional film and television productions they're classified as new media which means they can pay workers on set less make them work longer hours pay lower residuals avoid paying pension or healthcare contributions and this almost exploded into a full blown Hollywood strike led by the Etsy in the last year but few modern media industries show the rot and stagnation of art under capitalism quite like video games in my opinion a rapid decline of this industry in the space of just a few years I'm just over 30 I'll tell you how much but I'm old enough to remember when games cost 40 pounds they were about 10-30 hours of gameplay out of the box and what you had was a finished product these days they're trying to introduce a 70 pound price tag for disco download and the game you buy will be a buggy mess rush the market further monetized with addictive loot crates micro transactions and DLC and the actual disc content is usually around 5 hours this is literally like inflation or de-inflation of quality it's so obvious in the last periods and all the while workers in this sector are under ever greater pressure to work brutal hours under crunch conditions to get the game to market working 10, 11, even 12 hour days 6 days a week and the result is this vicious cycle where unreasonable expectations and intense meddling from game publishers who hold the purse strings result in sub-par games that see studios disbanded and dozens or hundreds of workers laid off if they flop one of the biggest game publishers Electronic Arts has shut down 14 game studios to date just chewing them up and spinning them out all the while the profits of the capitalists in this sector have never been higher it's $200 billion for the first time this year and the workers in these industries are only lately beginning to unionize up until now they have been little more than raw material for exploitation and because of that it's looking wonder that a slew of sleazy scandals and abuse of women has come to light in major games companies like Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft in recent years but despite all of this art cannot help but reflect life to a certain extent and a number of popular pieces of media in the last few years even in the bellotted mainstream from Parasite to Squid Game to Joker have been produced which reflect a frustration towards the injustice of the capitalist society and it reflected back onto the real world people were dressing up as the Joker during strikes and protests throughout Europe and the Middle East a couple of years ago people were dressing up as the Joker Squid Game, the Costume and Squid Game were used by striking South Korean workers recently so this anger is finding its way to the surface to art to a certain extent even now but while art and artists can articulate anger with capitalism they cannot overthrow it in fact the arts prisoners and return into games for a second in a recent telling example again while I was writing this the main developers of a really good video game in the museum low budget inspired by Marxist ideas sleeper hits whose makers describe themselves as communists who when they were accepting their Game of the Year award dedicated the game to Marx and Engels were just a week ago a few weeks ago booted out of the company that they founded by the investors they brought on in order to get that game to a bigger market and it was such a disaster that the country that company was founded at Estonia was sent into a minor economic crisis as a consequence that was a direct consequence but fed into an economic crisis in that country so I think this is a really microcosmic but nevertheless telling example this is people inspired by Marxist ideas were really trying to articulate something against capitalism but the art they create is constrained by the system and ultimately it's only the working class that can free art and artists from their chains so I do believe there is such a thing as progress in art and I believe there is such a thing as good art there is a subjective component I mean I'm sure you have debates about taste I'm not going to deny that and I think that's important I'm sure there's art but I like the you won't and vice versa and that's fine but I do think there is such a thing as art that is superior and why can I say this well I think it's based on this metric does it tell the truth does it say something meaningful and genuine about the world for art to be true it must be allowed to follow its own logic and that's the reason so many films and TV shows and games are ruined by investor and publisher and studio interference creation by committee and trying to make art fit consumer trends can never be truthful equally I don't really think propaganda which is different from political art can ever be truly great art it can be good but I don't think it's ever able to freely express a point of view because it serves a specific purpose it's tied to a political need the Bolsheviks understood this they understood the difference between propaganda and political art and art in general and in its healthy period the Russian Revolution imposed very little control of artistic expression but don't take my word for it I have a quote here by an Oxford historian of Russian literature Max Hayward who's a reactionary conservative not a fan of the Bolsheviks and he says following the revolutionary censorship's main function was to prevent the publication of overtly counter-revolutionary works it did not interfere with basic literary freedom in matters of form and context and this was reversed by the Stalinist counter-revolution because the Stalinist fear everything that they cannot control which includes creative and free expression the official style of the USSR adopted I think in 1937 I want to say socialist realism was neither socialist nor realist it presented as a vapid, idealized representation of Soviet society in which the working class was denied any independent voice over its creation but the market under capitalism has become a far greater obstacle I would say to create an expression and development than even the monstrous Stalinist bureaucracy because there was good art made actually during the Stalinist period especially in Eastern Brock but maybe again in the discussion bourgeois culture as a whole has descended into Philistinism the ruling class today understands the price of everything and the value of nothing look at the way the culture sector go to the war during the Covid-19 pandemic 120,000 people lost their jobs in Hollywood in a single year thousands of theatres, cinemas music venues around the world closed their doors forever and last year the Tories announced a 50% cut in funding to art subjects in schools because these are not proper subjects they will not get you proper jobs the bourgeois only care about art for two things if it can be exploited for profits or if it can be shown off I think it's illustrated very eloquently early on by John Dodginton a landlord and MP in England who put in an order for an opera house box in Venice in 1672 writing with astonishing frankness seeing as I declare I do not love music as regards poetry I do not esteem it and I do not understand the theatre the only reason I ask for this favour is so as I may keep up appearances my most recent predecessor had boxes and all the other residents of course currently have them and this is about the attitude of the bourgeois art source coiners of the fine art market today who chase trends and hoard trinkets for their private galleries the global value of the fine art market increased from 50 billion dollars to 65 billion dollars between 2020 and 2021 and what sort of work is esteemed by critics in this milieu the shortlist for the prestigious 2016 Turner Prize included following a stack of 20,000 pounds in pennies a suit made of bricks and a huge golden sculpture of a pair of buttocks and to be clear I'm not rejecting experimental or abstract art Goya Picasso posed groundbreaking challenges to the rules of their art forms they all had something profound and interesting to say in breaking with the orthodoxies but what does a brick suitor of a golden bum have to say absolutely nothing, it has no content no content other than having no content it seeks to demonstrate that it doesn't care whether it means anything it literally assails itself on the fact that it is vacuous it's not simply different Goya Picasso it's worse, it's inferior it reflects the dead ends of bourgeois culture art today, in my view needs to be rescued from capitalism and that is a revolutionary task first things first though we need to solve the problem of bread we have to guarantee the basics nobody can make good art if they can't feed and house and clothe themselves if they can't survive and for as long as art remains the preserve of the wealthy and the middle classes we can't tap into even a fraction of the artistic potential of humanity and if we're going to do that it means we need a socialist revolution because by harnessing the full productive capacity of society on the basis of rational planning we can shorten the working week shorten the working day we can make education including in the arts free and available to all access to art free and available to all we can harness the great strides forward in cultural developments facilitated by capitalism and actually use it to let artists freely create art that as the chair explained offers a prison a reflection of people onto the world free from the need to compete and compromise on an open market to survive artists will be free genuinely truthful art and on the basis of planned production if we go much further there will be a harmonisation of form and function in the fields of architecture and civil planning under socialism as well ordinary people would have the right to live in well-designed, clean attractive surroundings but most importantly by ending the animal struggle for resistance humanity's sights will be raised out of the gutter this will be a step forward to the objective development of art not just the objective development of new technologies our sights will be raised out of the gutter and we will find new avenues to create an expression that we cannot even contemplate today in the same way that the neolithic man could not have imagined the narrative figure oh we can't imagine the kind of arts, the kind of music the kind of films, the kind of video games that the communists of the future will be able to create on the basis of the rational planning of society and that is the future we're fighting for if you care about art then you care about the social transformation of society thank you very much